PURPOSE: To recognize character-to-character spaces (space character) in a Japanese document with high accuracy by making a full-size/half-size discrimination.

CONSTITUTION: When a character recognition result before or after a blank part between characters indicates a punctuation mark, brackets, etc., whose print position is omnipresent on a line head or tail side, the width of the blank part is corrected and then compared with the standard character width of the same line to recognize spaces between characters distinctively from full-sized and half-sized characters. When there is a space which is larger than ≥1 character between characters, the blank width after correction is divided by the standard character width and the remainder is compared with the standard character width to perform space recognition; and full-sized spaces as many as characters equal to the quotient of the division are added to the result to obtain a final result.